SELF-PROMOTION AND THE CHALLENGES WE FACE AS KAINE

As I was unable to sleep, due to healing pain in my shoulder, I thought I would put a few thoughts down about the life of an unsigned, self-promoting band. I am writing this just to highlight some of the struggles, not just myself, but we all have when trying to get our music out to our existing followers.

It can feel like quite a lonely place at times, you send out mailshots via email, messages via social media, post on your platforms and only a small percentage of people ever respond to what you are promoting, to even check it out, let alone even engage with it. It is a constant battle to try and be seen and heard through the noise of new media. Some people even get outright upset with your promoting, will block you, unfriend you, or unsubscribe within seconds not even taking just a minute to check out whatever it is you are trying to promote.

For us this week it has been our new music video, promoting our song “A Slave to the Grind” which has now just broken 1000 views (and nearly 100 likes) on YouTube. For us, these are reasonable numbers, but the sad thing is we have tens of thousands of people connected to the band via Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Bandcamp who will not engage with the new music video. Not only do these platforms purposefully hide unpaid posts from our followers, but those also who do see the posts do tend to scroll on by without engaging with us, despite making that choice to follow us on whatever platform it is.

Half the battle in the new era is to get that engagement, if you can get your casual followers to just “like” a post, let alone comment, you can get your content seen and importantly heard by a much larger group of people without having to pay for it. If we were able to get the majority of our supporters to regularly just “like” a post, even if it was just 1000 of those tens of thousands our content would be seen across Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, and so on by so many more people and we can grow organically without having to spend huge amounts just to get seen.

Unfortunately, despite the public being assaulted by advertisements and promotion both deliberate or subversive via social media influencers, for some reason musicians and bands have a much harder battle to get through to people, as so many people just outright take offence to bands trying to promote music, gigs, or even the absolute worse sin ever, encourage someone to buy a CD!

I do think there is a weird psychological prejudice against musicians trying to promote and sell our stuff, whereas Coca Cola for example, or Netflix, is routinely hammering everyone with adverts and people don’t react anywhere near as angrily to that. There have been times our promoted posts, just promoting a gig, have been filled with absolute abuse from people who have never heard a note from us just angry that we have even appeared on their timeline as a sponsored post. I doubt they kicked off at Sky TV promoting Sky Glass on their timelines the same way or throw an entire beer at the TV and fly into a fit every time a Hellman’s mayonnaise advert appears, but for some reason, if you are a Metal band they don’t know, you are literally the scum of the earth. The other bizarre trait is if you are a younger band doing a style of Metal influenced by earlier generations like we are, you often get called out as phoneys and imitators, whereas if you are a new band playing a new style your music is instantly trash also. It’s almost as if the music isn’t signed off and sealed by multinational corporations it’s immediately no good either.

One thing I think there needs to be more awareness of is, that while I am not a “full-time” musician, Kaine is a business, and part of that is I must work to promote the band. I treat it as if I were self-employed, I budget and manage every aspect of what we do. I pay for every advertisement, I pay to print every CD, I pay to record in the studio, pay for every rehearsal session, pay every piece of art, and therefore once we have a product, whether that’s a new album, music video, shirt or whatever that’s all come out of my money and the only way I have any chance to recoup that is by promoting it as hard as I can. I have to do what I can for free, and I have to spend money to get our posts seen. Otherwise, if I do not do this, we just lose money, and have a load of products sat there unsold. It’s a hard job, I spend more time doing this element than doing the music.

I am not pushing our stuff out there just to annoy people, it is a necessity to keep the band going. It’s not as if what we are doing doesn’t work, we have now sold over 5000 physical records, and in 2023 we were probably seen live by well over 2000 people, and that’s without playing a single big festival, sure it’s small beans for bigger bands, but for us, this is a huge achievement.

It is also worth mentioning, that we also run a Patreon scheme which helps mitigate our costs and we regularly reward our backers with CDs, patches, and new t-shirts for their support. These supporters have kept this band going over the last few years and enabled us to get moving forward and touring again.

In essence, what I am saying, is I know everyone is busy but if you do see a post from any of our Kaine pages/platforms, please drop it a like and comment, we aren’t asking you to buy anything most of the time. If it’s a new song or in this case, a new music video, check it out, it’s 4 minutes of your time, subscribe to our YouTube, click “like”, and comment, it is free, and it costs nothing. If we could get just 1000 people regularly doing that, you would see things change for us overnight. People power is so important to bands like ours, the more we can get actively engaged with us, and what we do, the better our chances are of breaking through on our own and pushing forward to more success. Can we get 1000 people to regularly back our socials in 2024? Seems like a high number, but I am going to try!

Finally, every like, comment, and share helps lower our costs of promotion overall, so you are helping in that way also. To those who have already engaged with us, and regularly support our posts, Patreon, and so on, thank you for your continued support and as I said earlier in this post, you have kept us going over the years.